Children of the Sun

by Max Schaefer

  ‘It’s a bit Wicker Man,’ whispered Adam as we entered.

  ‘It’s a bloody Wetherspoon’s. When did that happen?’

  Shortly after five, the pub was still quiet. The barmaid met our request for two pints of bitter with little expression. The drinks seemed cheap. We carried them to a table in the huge, roped-off ‘family area’, which was nearly empty; I wasn’t sure if we qualified, but no one challenged us. A brace of slot machines lit up in elaborate, compulsive patterns that repeated without end: they could have been animals performing a mating dance long fixed in their genes. Everyone ignored them. I had been preparing myself for BNP leaflets by the door, clusters of men, whose visible tattoos I would anxiously parse, muttering and shooting glances at the skin gear we wore; but there was nothing more than a bright display of affiliated drinks brands and a handful of people starting their Sunday night early. Nobody seemed to be investing in us even the mundane hostility of the provinces.

  I told Adam, ‘There’s something I’ve missed.’

  ‘Can we go home now?’ he said.

  ‘We could check that stretch of road again.’

  ‘James. There was nothing there.’

  ‘There’s not nothing, Ads. There was a brick through our window and I’ve been having online sex with Nicky Crane.’ Adam frowned at me, as if he had been missing something himself. ,

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘He’s not …’ He spoke carefully, as if to an invalid. ‘Whoever this guy is he’s not Nicky Crane, James.’

  I shook my head, impatient. ‘I don’t know who he is.’

  ‘Nicky Crane is dead. He died of Aids.’

  ‘Don’t patronize me, Ads. You don’t know everything, OK? There’s some fucked-up stuff involved. I’ve been trying to … protect you.’ But when he heard that he looked more worried about me than himself.

  ‘Protect me from what?’ he said.

  I began to answer, then breathed out and shook my head. This wasn’t the time to explain about the Death Ritual and aeonic manipulation.

  Adam said, ‘Someone’s been fucking with you. James, what are we doing here? Jesus, I thought … We go home, now, OK? And we go to the police.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said quietly, ‘you go find some real men,’ and Adam gave me a nervous, frowning smile and said, ‘What?’

  The barmaid was finishing a barrel. Its dregs hissed and spattered from the tap. ‘Go on then,’ I told him. ‘Go home.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Come on.’ He put his hand on mine.

  In a tone I hadn’t known I was capable of, I said, ‘Fuck off, Ads.’

  His whole head jerked, and his eyes filmed suddenly with water. He stood up and grabbed his jacket, trying to get out before I saw him cry.

  The Yorkshire Grey

  It is Saturday, 12 September 1992, and he is nearly at the top of the escalator when loud noise startles the surrounding chat. Shadows, massed against daylight above, steam into the lads up front, who react with jerky panicked yells. The assault is transmitted through the packed line of bodies: Tony grabs the handrail as the man in front stumbles back. A rain of missiles: something hard and heavy strikes his head; his skull rings with a dull interior sound. Glass explodes next to him on the ad for Miss Saigon, spraying his shoulder and the side of his face, his eyes automatically, mercifully, closed. Impacts echo up the long enclosure. The force of a renewed attack piles others back again and knocks him, tethered by his gripping hand, flat against the side. His legs scrabble to stand as one of the guys from the tube falls backwards past him in a mess of flailing. There is a cracking noise and a short slide and the man is prone against the moving stairs. He tries to sit up, disengaging whatever kept him in place, and slips again, arse and coccyx bumping hard on steps till his arms make a jamming brace beneath. His comrades rush forward, yelling in German. Tony sees the guys ahead huddling in a tortoise formation so when they come off the escalator they can force themselves far enough that they’re not shoved down it again: he runs to join it and in a blind push they stumble over the top and out on to the concourse, where the cluster comes apart and Tony, reeling in the sudden space, tries to take in what’s happening.

  Waterloo Station is an arena of shouts and chaos. There are people running in all directions, groups joining and splitting, and scores of fights up and down the length of the concourse: one-on-ones and five-on-ones and ten-on-tens. Under the repeating brown-and-orange logo of Smiths, scruffy figures boot one skin against the lowered shutter’s rattling base. Three policemen struggle to subdue a bearded man just feet from Tony: one grips him from behind with his arm round the man’s neck and his knee hammering his spine, while his colleagues pull back one arm each, producing a cruciform position in their opponent that seems designed to display his T-shirt, which says the only good nazi and then a graphic of a skewered swastika and then is a dead one. Three blacks now occupy the top of the escalator: one swings a crowbar at the void, from which angry yells emerge. Some skins try to intervene but before Tony can see what happens his vision is thrown into an unwilling spin by a hard punch to his right cheekbone. A kick to his calf tries to trip him, but he stays standing: the blind instinctive swipe of his arm connects ineffectually with something oddly soft but buys time to face his attacker, a man in his forties with long artless hair and a white top under a padded waistcoat: perhaps what Tony hit. He fixes Tony with an exhilarated grin and starts punching at his head and stomach, yelling, ‘Fucking nazi scum’ in a Brummie accent. Tony tries to get in a kick at his balls but there’s not enough room: the commie’s legs are in his way and vice versa so all they can do is mutually kick shins, beating each other ineffectually and collapsing inward as they do; nearly embracing now, an intimate exhalation of warm mint, each pair of hands moving to bash and scratch the other’s head.

  Tony grips the man’s ears in a hot squeeze and with a little bounce and tug tries to head-butt him, but the other reacts too quickly, and with guts, actually moving closer so that instead of Tony’s forehead smashing his nose in, they impact messily, with an agonizing crack above Tony’s cheekbone. He hears the noise in his whole head and loses vision in that eye, he is stumbling, but before his attacker can take advantage a policeman jumps him from behind. Tony backs off as the officer gets eagerly astride the man, shoving his face at the floor and scrabbling to cuff him.

  Tony’s eye feels horribly squashed. Sight is returning in ebbs between dark purple pulses and there is the pink shimmer of blood. He puts his hand to his face and despite the pain probes the socket for looseness, but the bone feels whole. He covers the eye and looks around. He is backed into a corner of the station, almost offstage; can hear his own gasping breath. From what he sees (with one eye working and the other making glitches like television interference) the skinheads are badly outnumbered, dispersed like morsels for the mass of reds, which has somehow occupied the entire station, to forage. The only challenge to them, and a welcome distraction, is the police. They don’t have the numbers to corral all the commies but are making violent token arrests, beating individual targets far past the point of just subduing them, to intimidate others into leaving. The blacks who had taken the top of the escalator, he’s pleased to see, are now a choice example of this … but before he can enjoy the display of truncheon work someone is out of nowhere beside him and saying, ‘Excuse me.’

  Tony starts, before processing the lack of threat in the words, the suit and hovering microphone. ‘Sky News,’ says the man, pointing to his camera-hefting colleague. ‘Are you with Blood & Honour?’

  Tony squints at the lens. ‘I’m just here to catch a train.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’re not filming — put the camera down, Mike, would you? We’re looking for the organizers of this concert, or whatever it is. Do you know where we can find them?’

  Tony spits the excess liquid from his mouth. ‘Can’t help you mate.’

  The reporter looks annoyed. ‘They said they’d be available for interviews now. Waterloo Station. How a
re we meant to find them?’ He looks around, demonstrating the problem. ‘I guess they weren’t expecting this.’

  ‘They better not have been is all I can say.’

  ‘Thanks. Shit. Mike, can we get some more of the riot from here…?’

  They walk away, ignoring him now. He is watching them frame a shot when he hears shouting: ‘Over there!’ — somehow the noise of someone singling you out is uniquely penetrating — and three reds approach, grimacing with effort. Tony turns for the exit at the top of the station, but before he gets there it fills with dogs — suddenly, as if curtains parted — a hunting pack of twenty or thirty and, gripping their leashes, more police. He lunges out of the way and they charge straight for his pursuers, the cameraman, he sees, already filming this. Then there is a hand on his arm and a policeman saying, ‘Come with me, we’ll get you out of here.’ But instead of taking him through the exit he leads Tony, who does not argue, to the middle of the concourse, standing with him like an au pair while the dog handlers break apart and spread through the station. More policemen approach where Tony stands, some bringing other skinheads, and he sees what they’re doing, gathering all the nationalists into a group they can cordon off and protect. Soon there are twenty skins, then forty, ringed by as many police again, and it feels like a school outing or something, the skinheads dazed and largely silent, several bleeding, too drained to return much abuse to the reds, who jeer from an enforced distance and occasionally lob bottles despite excited warnings from the police.

  Clustered together on the wide space of the concourse, in sunlight falling through the high glass panels of the roof (where the noise of the fighting calmly echoes, and from a rafter of which descends a big orange triangle that for some reason wants to label where they stand with the letter G — a pigeon settles on this marker and launches restlessly off), the skinheads watch their escorts rescue isolated colleagues, some needing to have attackers pulled from them one by one, others emerging from hiding places (two were behind an unmanned information desk) and joining the assembly of their own sheepish accord, avoiding the eyes of officers parting to admit them.

  If you look along the roof there are more of those triangles. H near where the dogs came in, and past the big central clock F, and another beyond that too far for him to read. Across the top of the Departures board runs an unbroken row of cancelleds and delayeds.

  ‘All right Tony?’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Coppers can’t tell the difference can they?’ says Glenn. ‘All just skinheads to them.’ He smiles. He has somehow got right next to Tony; he speaks quietly, but does not whisper.

  Tony can’t hack the look in his eyes and turns away. ‘Wanker.’

  ‘There’s a few of us here, not just me. Well, we’re on CCTV now aren’t we, don’t want to do nothing heavy. But the nice officers are going to walk us all outside for your safety and that. And there’s no cameras out there.’

  ‘You’re a fucking race traitor Glenn.’ Tony, because he doesn’t know what would happen otherwise, collaborates in the conversational hush: they could be queuing at a supermarket checkout. ‘You’re worse than a fucking nigger.’

  ‘If you like. I just wanted to tell you before it kicks off. There’s a truce between us as far as I’m concerned. For old times’ sake. But I can’t speak for the other lads, so I’d run if I was you. When you get the chance. Is this bonehead wanker a friend of yours?’

  He kicks both ankles of the man in front, who stiffens.

  ‘Know him Tony do you?’ mutters Glenn.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good, because when we get out of here he’s dead. Did you hear me you daft nazi cunt?’ Glenn kicks him again. ‘When we get outside I’m going to kill you.’ The man is visibly shaking.

  Slowly the police begin to move the group towards the far end of the concourse. Beyond the cordon, watching reds yell taunts and insults. Some get a chant going, ‘Police protect — nazi scum!’, until the objects of their criticism set dogs on them. Near the driveway for postal vans two men in donkey jackets conduct — amazingly — a paper sale. ‘Buy a copy, officers?’ one calls as the tense formation troops past. ‘Read about how workers pay for government failures. One pound solidarity price.’ He waves it after them: Workers’ Power, it says on a red background, and on black, hands off Iraq!

  Glenn mutters: ‘How’s your love life then?’

  ‘Fuck off all right.’

  ‘Touchy aren’t you? Don’t they know you’re a poof these mates of yours?’

  Tony says nothing. They are nearly at the closed-off bit where the new station is being built. In two minutes they will be outside.

  ‘Bound to be some likely shags in this lot Tony. You know what these Europeans are like.’

  From behind, Tony watches the face of the man Glenn has threatened to kill. He is listening; his pupil trembles against the corner of his eye.

  ‘I can big you up if you like,’ Glenn offers. ‘You always were good in bed.’

  The subdued shuffle of the skins’ boots as they are herded sounds like rain against the roof.

  ‘Better than Nicky if I had to be honest. To my taste anyway. Probably because in your own way you were even more fucked up. Did you see him on telly the other week? Bet that upset a few people.’

  They file through the doorway and down the steps.

  ‘You know what my favourite bit was? Right after you’d come. You’d always go a bit bad-tempered but I liked it. Do you still talk in your sleep?’ he adds, mimicking: “‘Hello? Hello?”’

  They stand at the bottom of the stairs, where the sloping access road leads to the street. People are quiet: the skins, many aware by now of what is happening, waiting for the infiltrators to strike, not sure, with so many foreigners and out-of-town-ers, which of their neighbours to trust; the police oblivious, relieved to have got the nationalists out of the station and apparently with no plan for what to do next. You’d think they would either disperse them or at least keep moving but for now there’s nothing going on.

  Tony tenses, waits.

  And as if at some signal (but none that he notices) it happens. The group explodes from within, like it was packed with charges, amid yells of triumph and surprise. Not expecting such a swell of force, the police perimeter strains, is breached, fragments. People are on top of each other like skins at a gig. In front of Tony, Glenn’s nominated victim spots a gap and is already running, Glenn managing only an approximate blow — with a stick produced from somewhere — as he goes. Not waiting to see more, Tony pushes against the thinnest part of the surrounding crowd and breaks through.

  He runs. Down the slope into the wide street below, and over towards the river. He has no plan but to gain distance. His hurt eye feels newly tight with the rush of blood from sprinting.

  In the protection of the South Bank complex he slows and breathes deep and long, looking about in case there are reds here too. There’s no point going back to Waterloo. He could phone Steve and ask where the gig is. But when he has climbed the stairs by the concert hall, panting by the statue of the terrorist Mandela, a large crowd of skins approaches from the footbridge across the Thames. They wear jeans and black bomber jackets with patches, or camouflage, and several carry backpacks. They are grinning and chatting as they saunter towards him. One walks up to Tony. ‘Hello, mate,’ he says, ‘are you going to the concert?’ He has a foreign accent but good English. ‘Is it that way to Waterloo?’

  ‘Yeah but it’s fucking chaos over there.’

  ‘Chaos?’

  ‘Communists.’

  The man grins. ‘We can handle communists. Come with us.’ He holds out his hand — ‘I’m Peter’ — and introduces a few companions, whose names Tony doesn’t take in. ‘We’re from Antwerp,’ Peter says. ‘It’s in Belgium.’

  ‘Tony,’ says Tony, looking over Peter’s shoulder. There are sixty or seventy men with him.

  ‘We’ve come a long way for this,’ Peter says.

  When t
hey arrive back at Waterloo, the base of the steps is occupied by about twenty skins: the reds have retreated inside. The skins shout into the entrance, guarded by uncertain police; one or two wave swastika flags. As the Belgians arrive, the groups salute each other across the street.

  ‘Can’t get in,’ an English skin tells Tony. ‘Too many reds. Coppers can’t control them so they’re keeping us out instead.’

  ‘Anyone seen an organizer?’

  ‘What do you fucking think?’

  ‘Listen,’ Tony says, ‘a mate of mine should know where the gig is. He’s one of the stewards. I’ll try and get hold of him.’ Tony leaves the Belgians with the others and crosses the road to the nearest phone box. He roots around in his wallet for the scrap of paper where he once wrote Steve’s cellular number, and to his surprise finds it. He pushes a phonecard into the slot and dials. The display flicks on: £5.60.

  A long pause, then a faint and crackly ring. Over the road, a policeman walks down the steps and speaks to the nearest skins.

  No answer. Tony dials again. This time, after several rings, conversation and loud laughter. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Steve?’

  ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Steve it’s Tony.’

  ‘ … who?’

  ‘Tony.’

  ‘Tony mate how’s it going?’

  £4.90. Jesus. ‘Where are you Steve?’

  ‘What? I’m in the pub mate.’

  ‘What pub?’

  ‘Down Victoria.’

  ‘Victoria?’

  ‘What?’

  Down the road, a gang of forty or so casuals are approaching from County Hall. The policeman talking to the skins has gone. Nobody guards the entrance now; the skins are animated; something is about to happen. They talk or argue and look anxiously round. A group of six breaks off for the roundabout.